The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to an image preview technique, and more particularly, to a preview system for concurrently displaying multiple preview images generated based on an input image generated by an image capture apparatus and related preview method thereof.
Camera modules have become popular elements used in a variety of applications. For example, a smartphone is typically equipped with a camera module, thus allowing a user to easily and conveniently take pictures by using the smartphone. In general, the smartphone has a display screen which can display a preview image obtained via the camera module before the user actually touches a shutter/capture button. Due to development of the camera module, the camera resolution/capture resolution of the camera module on the smartphone may be higher than the display resolution of the display screen of the smartphone. As a result, the image resolution of each captured image generated by the camera module is higher than the display resolution of the display screen. Hence, due to the resolution discrepancy, the display screen is unable to show all of the details originally present in the captured image generated by the camera module under the preview mode. According to the conventional design, the preview image displayed on the display screen is generally a down-scaled version of the captured image generated by the camera module under the preview mode. Therefore, the preview image would lack certain details originally present in the captured image. Besides, it is possible that a down-scaled version (e.g., a preview image) of the captured image looks fine when displayed on a lower-resolution display screen (e.g., the display screen of the smartphone), but the captured image looks blurry when displayed on a higher-resolution display screen (e.g., a display screen of a personal computer). Therefore, when viewing the preview image displayed on the lower-resolution display screen, the user is unable to know what detail will be actually captured by the higher-resolution camera module.
Thus, there is a need for an innovative camera preview design which is capable of assisting the user to know what detail will be actually captured.